Here’s a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a good thing.
Here’s an example of a Muxtape. I don’t have one near, but I bet it’s optimized for the iPhone.
I’ve noticed recently that I simply cannot keep up with all the e-mail I receive, both here and on Mashable where I’m the features editor. I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who wrote to me and I didn’t reply, but unfortunately my e-mail overload is getting bigger and bigger and I doubt this situation will get better.
I have, however, become a lot more active on social sites like Twitter and Pownce. Since I’m blogging when the USA is asleep, I’m quite a lonely blogger, and it feels good to have this stream of info from other bloggers, readers, developers, designers and tech aficionados. Furthermore, if you send me something over these networks, I’m actually more likely to notice than if you send me an e-mail - especially since Gmail’s spam filters have become somewhat less effective. Therefore, I’d like to call everyone to join me on various social networks I’m actively using. Here’s the list:
Franticindustries.com got hacked over the weekend with the usual result of nasty keywords appearing in the posts. After a couple hours of tinkering, hopefully I’ve now patched most of Wordpress’ many security holes; but the blame is ultimately on me for not keeping Wordpress up to date.
In short: lame wannabe hackers: not cool. Not keeping your Wordpress up to date: dumb. Spending half of the weekend hardening Wordpress’ feeble security: priceless.
There’s a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends’ activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual item. For some reason, several prominent bloggers decided that FriendFeed is the next Twitter; while I agree that connecting and organizing all of your web activity in one place might be the next big thing, I don’t see FriendFeed being exceptionally good at it.
I’ve tried out FriendFeed briefly before, and let’s just say I wasn’t overwhelmed with what it can do (you can see my feed here.) Similar services abound: see Profilactic (my coverage here, my profile here), SocialThing, or Correlate.us as examples.
All of these services do more or less the same thing. Louis Gray seems to think that the big difference between FriendFeed and everything else is the fact that you can comment on items or “love” them, but I don’t see what, exactly, are the benefits of these options. I can barely find time to comment on blog posts; why the hell would I comment on bits and pieces of my (or someone else’s) online activity? The fact that the option is there doesn’t exactly hurt, but at best I consider it a very minor advantage.
To be honest, I’m a little bit biased about the entire concept of lifestreaming. I have on my hard drive the outline of a project that would - in my opinion - do much more with this idea, but I haven’t had the time or the manpower to start it. In brief, I think that all the apps I’ve mentioned above, as well as others like them, don’t really help you organize your online life well enough; they’re just spewing it all out in a long, hard-to-follow string of events which are only interesting as a “what’s this guy up to right now” kind of thing, but quite pointless in the long run. Thus, no, I don’t think that FriendFeed is in any way revolutionary: it’s a nice application and it’s popular because it’s a little bit better than most of its competition, but I don’t see any disruptive capacity in it just yet.
Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it’s not a startup. It’s nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says “Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice enough RSS aggregator simply because it came early, but let’s face it, it’s a static version of Netvibes.
So, where does that leave Alltop? Nowhere, really. Absolutely no one would report on this one if Guy Kawasaki wasn’t behind it, and next time, they probably won’t.
Now, the interesting thing about this story is not the site itself, but the fact that this is one of those situations where you think to yourself: what the hell were they thinking? What was Guy thinking when he announced Alltop? What is he hoping for; how does he hope to gain readership for this thing, how does he plan to make money off it, and the like?
Luckily, you actually can learn what Guy was thinking in Kristen’s video interview with Guy, embedded below.
My interpretation is that Guy is thinking that RSS is a concept that the majority of internet users don’t understand (which is correct,) that folks who are new to RSS don’t want to bother to find all the feeds that they might be interested in (also correct,) however, everyone wants to be able to read a lot of information from various sources in a very simple way (partly true), and this is what Alltop provides. Another very positive thing about this project is that it was very, very cheap, and therefore, even if it fails, who cares? You got to congratulate Guy on that one.
There are also problems. One problem is that you cannot just copy a site (Popurls), add some non-essential improvements (more feeds) and think that you’ll achieve the same level of success as the original. It just doesn’t work that way, and it’s hard to explain why, but it just doesn’t.
And even if it did, a company like Netvibes can simply publish a customized page which would show the exact same feeds, only with all the benefits that Netvibes have. In other words, Alltop is replaceable. Easily.
BTW, if you’re interested in something like Alltop, only much better and with much nicer options, check out DailyRotation. They’ve been doing it for years, although the site is focused only on technology.
Secondly, he’s understimating his users. People do care about customization. MySpace users, which are for the most part kids that don’t know much about computers, customize their pages to an extreme extent. Alltop doesn’t even let you see more stories for a particular feed, and that’s the first thing people are gonna miss. Popurls is better with that regard - it gives you some basic customization options.
All in all, I think I know what Guy was thinking when he created Alltop; the idea isn’t all that bad, but the actualization of it is just not good enough.
I know the iPhone has been tested, tried, cracked, and tampered with in all possible ways, but I don’t often see anyone talking about a serious issue that stabbed my eyes practically from day one I’ve had the device: multitasking.
Now, these problems are reiterated by a find from TechCrunch, which points out certain flaws and limitations in the iPhone SDK, namely:
“Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)”
Now, as all of you iPhone users know, the iPhone supports multitasking - up to a certain degree. For example, if you open a page in your web browser, it’ll remember it even if you close Safari, open something else and then open Safari again. However, it does this by running all sorts of services in the background (that’s also why the iPhone is so blazingly fast compared to other cellphones.)
But iPhone applications can’t do everything in the background - sometimes the application just stops what it was doing when you quit. Furthermore, there’s no intelligent or easy to use interface to switch between (running) applications. Having to close one to open another isn’t really how I imagine multitasking. My Sony Ericsson P1i, for example, has a task manager for easy task switching.
According to the “iPhone Human Interface Guidelines” third party applications will be even more limited. They won’t even be allowed to run in the background. Perhaps I’m not the most common type of user, but I don’t look forward to silly games and Facebook-style timewasters from this SDK deal; I’m into really useful, robust apps that’ll continue to work, if needed, even if I switch to something else.
For me, this is a deal breaker. The iPhone is a very powerful gadget, but if you’re gonna limit it and the third party applications written for it left and right then it’s always going to remain what most people perceive it to be today: a fun, slick, trendy smartphone that can’t keep up with the “real” smartphones like Nokia N96 or Sony Ericsson P1i when it comes to real business.
There’s a lesson to be learned from it, and here it is: although Jason Calacanis has dived into the most competitive startup space, search, he’s done it well, and that’s why Mahalo is doing so great. Mahalo has been brimming with activity from the very beginning, and the actual search pages have been refined. The concept didn’t seem revolutionary at the time, but it was constantly improved. Compare the current search results, to how they looked at the beginning.
On the other end of the equation, I constantly see startups with weird and original ideas that will never amount to anything, simply because the actual implementation sucked. Sometimes improving is better than innovating.
Kristen from Mashable dug up a really cool website which specializes in t-shirts for venture capitalists. The site, called VCwear, is half-joke, half-real, but the actual t-shirts are really funny and that’s what counts. Check out the examples below.
Now, the prices are just a little too steep for me - 100 bucks per shirt - but then, again, I’m not a VC (yet), so there you go.
I often see comments, mostly coming from folks who live in the US, where EDGE is the standard and 3G - UMTS, HSDPA - is still very young, that you don’t need 3G if you have Wi-Fi.
This, I assure you, is very far from the truth. Even if you constantly move in an environment where free, open Wi-Fi is always present - which is rare - 3G just works better. UMTS signal penetrates natural obstacles better; it’s not sensitive to movoment as much as Wi-Fi, and you don’t have to worry about getting too far from an access point and losing connection. Furthermore, if your mobile device supports UMTS and it is enabled, and you have some kind of data plan set up with your mobile service provider, you don’t have to enter any data to access the Internet: no IPs, no gateways, no nothing. UMTS, as well as HSDPA, just works.
Of course, Wi-Fi has its own benefits; most importantly, the connection is usually way faster than UMTS or even HSDPA. However, most of the time you actually need Internet connection on your cell phone or other mobile device is when you don’t have a known Wi-Fi access point handy; you also usually need it to check your email or browse the net, not to download a lot of data. This is where 3G or even EDGE shines.
So, if we’re talking about the iPhone, or any other mobile device, and the Internet experience on it, don’t understimate 3G; in most cases, it’s a way better solution than Wi-Fi.
Everyone is happy about Sony Ericsson’s latest announcement, the wannabe iPhone killer XPERIA X1. And, while I like to see an interesting new phone (even though it’s built on the Windows Mobile platform, which - and I’m speaking from experience here - is an awful platform compared to Symbian, and will probably fare even worse compared to iPhone and its upcoming SDK as well as Android), I’m not particularly happy about it.
That’s because I own Sony Ericsson P1i, a Symbian UIQ3 phone. Since Sony Ericsson is basically the only significant backer of this platform (Nokia uses Symbian S60 or S80 for their smartphones), and they’re obviously switching to Windows Mobile since XPERIA X1 is only the first in a series of smartphones, I reckon that the UIQ3 platform is doomed to die a lonely death. Not that good for owners of UIQ2 or UIQ3 based phones, is it?
Well, perhaps it’s for the best. I’m a gadget fanatic and I do change them often; I’m buying an iPhone right now and will probably own an Android-based phone in a year’s time anyway. My P1i has served me well; it will probably continue to do so for another year or so.
However, this is one of those cases where you feel cheated. You buy a high-end smartphone, and expect good support and a lot of applications to play with, and you get shafted. From this perspective, Android’s openness and support from many strong backers sound really good, and I have more and more reasons to believe that it’s going to be the mobile platform of the future.
Yes, the truth has finally been exposed; I’ve been running this whole blogging scheme just to get on Valleywag, and now my life finally has a purpose. Well, sort of; I didn’t really get on Valleywag, I just happened to be next to that handsome rascal, Pete “The Heartbreaker” Cashmore, on a Mashable screenshot. But still; it’s there, and I expect big movie studios and hot female tech reporters (Natali del Conte, I’m looking at you) to come woo me any second now.
And here’s the proof (naughty bits blurred for the safety of our youngest readers):
Seriously though, Valleywag puts fun into this business. May they live long and prosper.
You know all about it by now, and if you don’t, you can get the scoop just about anywhere. Yes, Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo at a mind boggling 44.6 billion dollar valuation.
What I find strange about Microsoft’s move is the fact that it’s one sided. The deal is not officially closed yet; in fact, Yahoo hasn’t said yes to Microsoft; hell, they haven’t even signed the prenup yet. Given the fact that rumors about Microsoft buying Yahoo have been floating around for literary years (and the last time we heard it the valuation was 50 billion dollars,) one would expect that Microsoft would wait until the deal is really set in stone and then go public with it in a joint statement with Yahoo.
Instead, they go with a one sided proposal; dead serious and very accurate as far as numbers go, but still one sided. Is it a sign of desperation? After all, Google has been dominating a very, very large chunk of the online services business for a long time - especially advertising, where the real money lies. Or is it the fine print in an already signed deal with Yahoo that says that Microsoft has to come out of the closet first?
In any case, it would be very interesting (although unlikely) if Yahoo declined the offer; it’d be like to wounded soldiers with a feud, refusing to help each other and marching, both alone, towards an unhappy ending.
